Nick Sabalausky wrote:
I miss the days when there was such a thing as standard battery types.
Me too. My first bad experience with custom batteries was my trusty TI SR-50A calculator, vintage 1975. After a year, it would no longer hold a charge, but I could still use it with the charger plugged in. And so I used it that way for the next 6 years or so. Then the battery got so bad even that didn't work anymore, and an EE friend of mine devised a load that behaved like a battery. I soldered that in in place of the battery, and got a few more years out of the calculator until it completely expired.
Of course, this was in the years before there were desktop computers with calculator apps. Gosh I'm old!
(Just for grins, I pulled it out of a drawer and plugged it in. Random led's flash. Still busted. Oh well!)
